Battle Royale

One of the landmark films of modern Japanese cinema, bringing together social satire, video game aesthetics, and ultra-violent, coming-of-age drama in a perfectly paced, completely enthralling couple of hours of mayhem and carnage.

Set in a near future Japan, Battle Royale is a deadly reality game, devised by the government to make an example of a Youth out of control. 40 school kids are thrown onto a remote island and forced to battle to the death with a diverse array of weaponry, from pick axes to sub-machine guns - the spoils for the winner: survival. The game poses the question "would you kill your best friend to survive?" Each pupil answers it in their own way, choosing variously to rebel, fight, collaborate, run, hide, or die.

The fact that it's an often laugh-out-loud funny splatterfest (a pupil's decapitated head tossed into a building with a grenade in its mouth is particularly choice) doesn't entirely detract from the serious questions raised by the film's 'Battle Royale Millenium Act': Is this the extreme conclusion of social engineering? Society's fear of Youth given license to express itself in a murderous display of power. Is Battle Royale the reality game show the adult world secretly craves?

There are obvious parallels with Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange, but veteran filmmaker Kinji Fukasuku succeeds in updating these ideas for the new Millenium. Takeshi Kitano stars once again, playing the world-weary teacher and ringmaster of his gruesome circus with maniacal glee. If you haven't seen the movie, this is going to sound very wrong, but the moment when he hurls a knife into a pupil's forehead from halfway across the room is priceless.

バトル・ロワイアル
Dir. Kinji Fukasuku, 2000